Dr. Ravi Solanki earned a medical degree and a Ph. from Cambridge University and worked in an intensive care unit during the pandemic. But it wasn’t until last year, not long after moving to the San Francisco Bay Area for the artificial intelligence company he runs, that he started paying attention to heart rate variability, or HRV.
Suddenly, he was surrounded by technology professionals and started wearing a bracelet that monitors health and fitness data, as is local custom. He learned that HRV—basically a measure of how irregular your heart rate is—is correlated with brain and body health and began focusing on improving it.
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On his team of about 30 people, “a lot of people have Whoop,” Solanki said, referring to the health-monitoring smart bracelet. “As a group, we compare data. It’s a lot of fun, and it’s also very supportive. We help each other — ‘What can we do to improve performance at HRV?'”
As wearable devices like Fitbits and Apple Watches have proliferated over the past decade or two, many people have adjusted their health and wellness habits to improve how their bodies function.
But in recent years, more and more tech enthusiasts have been directing these biohacking efforts not just toward performance in the gym, but also in the office. The once eccentric quest for immortality is becoming part of the nine-to-five routine.
The trend has given rise to a small industry of coaches and gurus who train office professionals to raise their HRV, or help companies train employees to raise theirs.
Software companies have created dashboards that allow an HRV coach to track and analyze employee data and share team averages with managers. Matt Bennett, founder of Optimal HRV, which produces one of these dashboards, said subscriptions to the service have increased more than tenfold since 2020, reaching more than 4,000.
Increasingly, it seems, office professionals who want to stand out are obsessed with their HRV. Tim Ferriss, influencer and author of “The 4 Hour Work Week,” said he discovered HRV through a friend who “works with many of the best-performing investors in finance.” He added: “They all use HRV.”
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Should they?
Physical monitoring reaches the workplace
To the uninitiated, having a more variable heart rate can feel like impending disaster, a feeling you associate with the moment right before you pass out and wake up strapped to a gurney.
In fact, greater heart rate variability—a heart that doesn’t beat exactly every second, but, for example, after 1.1 seconds, then 1.05, then 0.95, then 1—tends to reflect physiological resilience. A person with a higher HRV can regain balance more quickly after a fright than someone with a lower HRV.
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HRV is also a relatively reliable indicator of general health: it typically decreases when someone is eating or sleeping poorly, or overexerting the body.
(Cardiac arrhythmia, a potentially serious medical condition, can manifest similarly, but its heart rate variations tend to be more erratic.)
While biohacking has long been popular in the technology sector, a growing number of performance-minded people appear to be working in law, marketing and other areas. Many of the people who responded to a recent New York Times questionnaire said they began measuring HRV out of an interest in health and well-being.
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Scott Braunstein, chief medical officer at Sollis Health, which offers a concierge service for urgent medical care, said that HRV measurements taken during sleep are more accurate and that factors such as diet or exercise influence readings taken throughout the day.
For some office professionals, HRV’s sensitivity is precisely its biggest attraction.
When Pete Zelles began giving presentations to senior executives at the large telecommunications company where he worked, the anxiety left him dizzy. A dedicated runner and cyclist, he decided to use his wearable devices to solve the problem.
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He ended up adopting a regimen of moderate exercise the morning of the performances and standing before them to burn off nervous energy.
Still, he hopes to do something even more valuable with the data from his devices: feed it into AI tools that can “reveal deeper truths and predictive guidance.”
Does improving HRV mean having better health?
To help clients increase their HRV, some consultants train them to breathe at a slow, steady rhythm known as the “resonance frequency” for a few minutes a day. The resonance frequency varies from person to person, said Inna Khazan, a clinical and performance psychologist at Harvard Medical School, but generally means breathing in and out three and a half to seven times per minute.
A lawyer at a financial firm who declined to be named said she increased her HRV by working on her breathing with Khazan and felt it improved her mental capacity. This is in line with studies indicating that these techniques can improve executive function and conditions such as depression, although some of the research is still in its early stages or needs more rigor.
Other experts question whether it makes sense to focus directly on improving HRV rather than emphasizing overall health and resilience to stress.
“We could deprive ourselves of food and our heart rate would be low, HRV would be high,” said Marco Altini, a data scientist focused on physiology. “But that would not be a healthy condition.” (Altini nevertheless agrees that breathing techniques can help reduce anxiety.)
Either way, this type of HRV coaching is becoming a profitable business, with clients in technology, law, finance, large corporations, and even the administrative departments of professional sports teams.
An effervescent sensation in the body
In December, Leah Lagos, a performance psychologist and HRV specialist, sent me a laptop and two sensors so she could identify my resonant breathing rate and guide me on the benefits of breathing at that rate for 15 minutes, twice a day.
Lagos said he works with professional athletes, corporate executives, hedge fund managers and law firm partners, among others. In her view, highly skilled office professionals are “biological athletes” who should seek to optimize their “cognitive self”, and stated that regular breathing exercises can make this more consistent.
“Perhaps your best performance is from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.,” she said. “But that might give you another two or three hours.”
After calculating my baseline HRV, she set up an electronic marker on the laptop monitor that alternated between four- and six-second intervals. She instructed me to breathe in through my nose for the shortest interval and breathe out through my mouth for the longest.
By the time we were done, my HRV had increased substantially, according to the numbers on the screen. “Most people notice the activity of the mind, the clarity—that’s often the first sign of resonance,” she said. “Another is that people say they feel a kind of effervescence in their body.” I had to admit that I felt something like that.
Still, it’s hard not to wonder if all this biohacking hasn’t become excessive. Among the people I spoke to, HRV was often just the tip of the iceberg. Some said they had multiple devices — watches, rings, bracelets, continuous glucose monitors — or that they tried to optimize their numbers as if they were playing a video game.
Others used this data to decide what time of day they should perform more demanding tasks and reorganized their routines accordingly.
Michelle Cicale, an executive assistant at a financial services company, said she uses an infrared sauna and red light to help improve her HRV, which she tracks with an Apple Watch. She said she decided to limit her biohacking to a few rituals after seeing friends go overboard.
“I’ve seen people go crazy over this,” he said.
For those who have anxiety — and, let’s face it, who doesn’t? — monitoring watches and rings can become a compulsion.
“What this technology has done is create an addiction, a type of safety-seeking behavior,” said Bonnie Zucker, a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles who specializes in health-related anxiety and panic disorder.
According to her, checking the devices is not very different from washing your hands repeatedly or checking if the door is locked: it may provide relief momentarily, but it quickly becomes pathological.
And all of this happens at the same time as artificial intelligence advances into office jobs, which may only increase anxiety for better job performance.
Some of the biohacking people I spoke to either worked in AI or, like Zelles, were very aware of its rapid advancement. Perhaps, in the race to stay ahead of the machines, it is tempting to try to become more and more like them.
c.2026 The New York Times Company
